Are single-sex schools facing extinction?
Last Friday, Sherborne School, the storied all-boys boarding school attended by Chris Martin and Jeremy Irons, announced it would merge with its sister school to go co-educational. Earlier this month, boys’ boarding school Tonbridge said it would start admitting girls into its sixth form. Winchester School, Rishi Sunak’s alma mater, will do the same from September, as will three grammar schools in Medway, Kent.
While it isn’t just private schools ditching their single-sex model, this move by independent institutions does appear to be an attempt to fill places since the addition of VAT on fees last year. But the editor of the Good Schools Guide, Melanie Sanderson, also attributed part of the trend to a “growing scrutiny of the culture within some traditional all-boys schools and questions about how healthy that environment is”.
I’d argue this is applicable to girls’ schools, too. I’m well aware I might not be where I am today without my hothouse grammar school. But if I have a daughter, I would never send her to a single-sex school. I didn’t realise what mine had done to me until after I left.
After passing the 11-plus, I went to a girls’ grammar school in Essex. Of course, my parents mostly sent me there because it was academic. But they had grown up in Sri Lanka, where single-sex education was the norm, and presumably thought boys an unhelpful distraction.But in my experience, the things single-sex schools are supposed to protect against are exactly what they breed. For instance, not getting distracted by boys. Our headteacher’s rather haughty motto was “boys are for recreation, not education”. But, that didn’t stop us from spending classes developing crushes on any unsuspecting male in the vicinity, though – our spaniel-eyed history teacher, the German student “Carlos” who helped with GCSE prep.
